Posts tagged Storage Spaces

In this blog post I will show you how to expand a Storage Space AKA virtual disk based on Storage Spaces Direct.The first thing is to understand that Multi-Resilient volumes are created differently comparing to a Parity or Mirror volume. A Multi-Resilient volume makes use of two tiers instead of one and therefore when expanding you need to expand multiple tiers.Read More »

There has been a lot of development the last couple of years on the Hypervisor and Storage landscape.
Where in the past we did big investments in separate infrastructure for Compute and Storage Array Network (SAN), now we see developments that beholds a combined infrastructure for both.

While the big vendors not seemed “All-in” on the Hyperconverged technology there have been very successful starts-ups focusing on this technology like Nutanix and Simplivity. Also VMware is picking up with the announcement of EVO:RAIL at VMworld in October 2014.

Hyperconverged with Windows Server 2016

This May, at the Microsoft Ignite conference, Microsoft announced their new Windows Server 2016 operating system.
Although there are many new features shipping with this release, one particularly caught my eye:

Storage Spaces Direct

With Storage Spaces Direct we have the ability to pool local disks of multiple servers to one big virtual disk.
This virtual disk can we add to a Failover cluster and use it as shared storage. I will write this down again: Use local disks as shared storage.
With this functionality Microsoft also announced they will support running Hyper-V Virtual Machines on the same servers as your using for your storage.
Voila, Hyperconverged with Windows Server 2016.

I know an illustration works better than words so this is what a Hyperconverged infrastructure will look like.

Hyperconverged makes your infrastructure drastically less complex, If you need extra storage or compute power, just shove an extra server in your cluster and you’re ready to go!
The storage virtualization software (Storage Spaces) will take care of the rest and will rebalance your data across the servers.

This above described functionality is all out-of-the-box with Windows Server 2016. Although Windows Server 2016 is planned for release somewhere around the summer 2016 timeframe, there are already public previews out to test.
You can download the Windows Server 2016 public previews here.

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I regularly write about Microsoft technologies on various blogs.
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Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) is a feature that is designed to provide scale-out file shares that are continuously available for file-based server application storage such as Hyper-V. Scale-out file shares provide the ability to share the same folder from multiple nodes of the same cluster.
In this blog we assume you already have played around with SOFS and know the basics.

There are multiple ways to connect storage to your SOFS cluster.
The most common way today is putting your SOFS cluster in front of an iSCSI or FC SAN, the upcoming method is using Storage spaces in combination with a “Just a bunch of disks” device also known as JBOD. We will cover them both in this blogpost.

Symmetric Storage

If the storage is equally accessible from every node in a cluster, it is referred to as symmetric storage.
Each node can take ownership of the storage in case of maintenance or failures which provides availability.
With symmetric storage, read and writes operations can be done by every node in the cluster (also referred to as “Direct IO”) however metadata operations must be done by the owner node which is orchestrating these operations.